Artillery of Lies (31 page)

“Mr. Lakram, Venezuelan consul. My office telephone is being repaired, a great nuisance, just like these government forms, this one is, let me see, eight pages long, I suppose I could send it to you, Mrs. Ogilvy, after all it concerns students, but I thought perhaps a simple phone call, I know how busy you are, and all I need is the names and addresses of your students from South America, Glasgow addresses that is, and I could do all the rest. The students have to sign their forms, you see, which means that one of us must visit them. To witness the signature,” Laszlo went on, improvising furiously.

A heavy sigh came down the line. “So which is it you want?” Mrs. Ogilvy asked. “Is it Venezuela, or is it Bolivia?”

I want to strangle you.
“Suppose we take them one at a time,” Laszlo suggested. “Bolivia first? Dr. Cabezas? Have you his address?” He had
the feeling that she wasn't listening. “Hello?” he said. He could hear files being thumped about and pages being slapped back and forth.

“It's as I thought,” she said. “We've nobody from Venezuela.”

“I'll take Bolivia,” Laszlo said quickly. “Also anyone else you can give me.”

In the end he got an address for Dr. Cabezas. It was Flat 17, Renfrew House, North Hanover Street. It seemed that Dr. Cabezas was a junior doctor at a teaching hospital called Glasgow Central. He also got someone from Brazil called José-Carlos Coelho, who was, or wanted to be, a forensic pathologist—Mrs. Ogilvy wasn't completely sure of her own handwriting here—and might well be attached to the medical school, although a professor of law was Usted as his senior tutor. Coelho lived in 22A Buccleuch Avenue. Laszlo didn't much want Coelho but Mrs. Ogilvy was determined that he took him.

“What was all that about, Mary?” a colleague asked.

“Oh … just some eedjit at the Venezuelan consulate.”

“Fancy. I never knew we had a Venezuelan consulate.”

Mrs. Ogilvy went back to her work. After a minute she reached for the Glasgow phone book. There was no listing for a Venezuelan consulate. She felt unhappy about that for the rest of the afternoon, but she did nothing, because anything she might have done would have made her look foolish. And they didn't pay her enough to look foolish.

The Junkers Tri-Motor was, in its heyday, a giant of the skies—maximum load, eighteen men—but it bumped and bucketed over Hamburg like a fairground ride.

The Ministry of Propaganda had arranged the flight. The passengers were senior officials of the ministry, a few favored journalists, the odd military attaché from the neutral embassies, some high-ranking air-raid-protection people, and Admiral Canaris, who had used his influence to get the airplane for the Propaganda Ministry. Alongside him sat General Oster and Commodore Meyer, alias Brigadier Christian.

Oster had a typed hand-out from Propaganda. “Apparently they concentrated on the center of Hamburg in the first raid.” He looked out. “Which part was the center, do you think?”

Canaris glanced over Oster's shoulder, and then shifted to the
other side of the plane and looked. “Hard to say. The rubble seems to be piled higher on your side, don't you think?”

“The smoke makes it difficult …” Christian began, and grabbed a strap as the plane bucked in a hot up-draft.

A civilian heard them, and called, “This is east Hamburg. The center is over there. See? Beyond the Elbe.”

“Many thanks,” Canaris said.

They were flying low, only three or four hundred feet, and they could smell the burned and burning city. A few of the more queasy passengers held handkerchiefs to their mouths and noses. “Working-class districts,” Oster said, reading the hand-out. “Hot night, no rain for a long time, the Hamburg fire brigade couldn't get through because the streets were blocked by the bombing.”

“They say it was like a furnace, literally like a furnace,” the helpful civilian told them. “They say the temperature reached one thousand degrees centigrade. People tried to run but the wind was like a hurricane. Everyone died, everyone.”

“They all died?” Christian said. The man nodded. “Then who measured the temperature?” Christian asked curtly. The man looked shocked, and turned away.

Christian was surprised at his own anger. The airplane banked and he was looking at a different area of devastation. Here the buildings were not gutted: they were flattened, erased. It was not possible to make out a pattern of streets, and it was scarcely possible to believe that men had caused this obliteration. Christian's mind dreamed a fantasy: some careless, thoughtless giant had swept Hamburg away with the back of his hand. But this silliness made him even angrier. The giant was the Royal Air Force, sending five, six, seven hundred heavy bombers, not to hit docks or factories but to burn a city, the second biggest city in Germany. He blinked to clear tears from his eyes. If only they knew, he thought: the harder they hit us, the stronger they make us. Soon, London will look like this.

The Junkers made a pass over the undamaged suburbs, just for journalistic balance, and flew back to Berlin, where they got out and listened to a spokesman from Propaganda reading a statement: “Deliberate terror raids … martyred for the Reich … negligible effect on war production … morale higher than ever … God will surely punish … a new Hamburg will arise …”

When they walked to the car, Canaris said, “As ever, the communiqué is interesting for what it does not reveal. No mention, for
instance, of the fact that nobody is living in the parts of Hamburg that were
not
bombed.”

Christian was puzzled. “Nobody, sir? You mean they've been evacuated?”

“I mean they've run away. Wouldn't you? In the space of ten days their city has been massively bombed on four nights by the British and on two days by the Americans. I ask you: why wait to be blown to pieces?”

“My information is that one million have left Hamburg,” Oster said. “It's virtually empty. Did you see anyone on the streets? I didn't.”

“I think I saw one policeman,” Canaris said. “I think he waved. Perhaps he was telling us to go away. I don't suppose they like having airplanes over their city … Did we get any warning from Eldorado about those raids?”

“No, sir,” Oster said.

“That's disappointing. We really need to know these things. Shake him up, will you?” Canaris said to Christian. “Tell him it's our number-one top-priority area of intelligence. Hamburg wasn't the first and it won't be the last, will it?”

They got into the car. It made good time into the city: Berlin was far less crowded nowadays. “Speer reckons that if five or six more cities get the Hamburg treatment, the war will go out of business,” Oster said.

“Speer should go and work for the Allies,” Canaris said, and smiled. The others chuckled, although Christian couldn't see what was funny. Not that there was anything new about that.

The
Abwehr
had offices all over Europe, and each had its allotted task. Oslo, for instance, was interested in weather over Britain. Brest concentrated on reports of sabotage. Paris collected information about general living conditions. Madrid's concern was the supply of arms and other war
matériel
from America, convoy intelligence and food stocks. Hamburg took care of anything involving the Allied air forces. Agents directly controlled by
Abwehr
headquarters in Berlin usually supplied political intelligence. It was all very decentralized. Each office guarded its own sphere of operations and had little to say to any other office. When a goldmine like Eldorado came along, of
course, Madrid
Abwehr
didn't hesitate to take everything he sent and ask for more, even if it fell outside their brief. Nevertheless, Hamburg was supposed to be the primary channel for air-force intelligence, and Christian was uneasy about bypassing Hamburg in favor of Madrid. “They'll raise holy hell if they hear about it,” he told General Oster. “They've become very touchy since the raids.”

“Screw them. The Admiral wants Eldorado to do Hamburg's job, and that's what the Admiral gets.”

“I've drafted this signal. It's quite short, because now we have a radio link with Eldorado I didn't want to risk anything long.”

Oster read it. “Better show it to the old man,” he said.

Canaris read it. “Too polite,” he said. “It sounds like an order for a dozen linen table-napkins. Kick the fellow's backside a bit. The Allies think they can win the war with their bombers. We need to know all about that campaign: when, where, how many, what type, which target. Forget the rest of the war. Make him focus on that. It's crucial.”

Christian went away and re-wrote the signal. “Better,” Oster said. “Now you've tied a rocket to his tail. Now we'll see what he's worth.”

Dr. Cabezas had had six hours sleep in forty-eight, which was about average for a houseman at Glasgow Central Hospital. The houseman system had two things going for it: firstly, all the consultants had had to do it in their day and so they couldn't see why the youngsters should escape it now; and secondly, it was cheap. Instead of relays of doctors coming and going you only paid this one battered specimen whose eyes, toward the end, looked like old inkwells. The fact that fatigue might damage judgment was well known but ignored. Anyway, you might be lucky. You might have a quiet time.

Dr. Cabezas was on duty in Casualty and the time was not quiet. Glasgow generated a stream of damaged humanity: everything from children who had fallen off walls to welders who had fallen off ships, and from heart attacks in the street to brawls in the bedroom. Appendicitis, electrocution, food poisoning, fits, scaldings, dog-bites, boils on the backside, unsuspected pregnancies, fingers hacked by breadknives, dislocations on football fields—the victims of these and many other misfortunes arrived at Casualty in a stream that
occasionally, unpredictably, built to a sudden flood of pain.

Dr. Cabezas came off duty at 6 p.m., too tired to eat and almost too tired to walk to the tram that went up North Hanover Street. Renfrew House was an ugly thing made of red sandstone long since gone black but it was home and Flat 17 contained a wonderful bed. As Dr. Cabezas trudged up the stairs all she could think of was falling into it and sleeping forever.

Laszlo was standing by the fireplace when she switched on the light. He was startled to see a young woman; a slim, pretty, black-haired young woman, brown eyes slowly widening with shock. Nobody had said Dr. Cabezas was a woman. But nobody had said she wasn't, either. His arms were folded, hands under his jacket.

“You are Garlic,” he said firmly and clearly. Two days and two nights of doctoring the sick had left her brain dull and her reactions slow. “I am garlic?” she said. The words were nonsense. They were enough for Laszlo. He unfolded his arms. The pistol swung out and up as if his arm were on a spring and he shot her, aiming at the breastbone and missing and hitting the throat. She was holding the doorknob with her left hand and the impact made her seem to fling herself away from Laszlo in revulsion. He did not like that. But at least it slowed her fall and she collapsed with no more noise than someone dropping a pair of boots, which was lucky because the silencer had been much louder than usual, like someone slamming a heavy book. Maybe it was wearing out. Laszlo held it up and looked at it. Nobody in Madrid had said anything about silencers wearing out. And nobody had said anything about Garlic being a woman. Madrid
Abwehr
wasn't half as clever as it thought it was. It had been all wrong about Venezuela. Venezuela was really Bolivia. That's what Laszlo called really sloppy, making a simple blunder like that, and when he remembered how much extra work it had caused him he got quite annoyed. He had thought hard about the problem all afternoon and finally reached the only possible solution. Garlic had to be a medical student at Glasgow University from South America, allegedly Venezuela. The only South American medical student was Bolivian. Therefore the Venezuelan connection must be wrong, which left the Bolivian medical student, who must be Laszlo's man. Or, as it turned out, woman. He went over and looked at her.

Dr. Cabezas lay in an awkward sprawl, not at all like the tidy postures of death that Laszlo had learned from the movies. There was a tremendous amount of blood; it did not seem possible that such
a slender creature could flood the floor with redness. He supposed she must be dead; he didn't want to tread in the blood in order to find out. The pistol felt heavy and he let his arm fall to his side. A kind of wistfulness crept over him, a feeling of flatness, of anticlimax. He had come such a long way to do this and now it was over too quickly. Perhaps she wasn't dead, not completely dead. Perhaps he ought to shoot her again. The more he thought about it, the more it revived him and he stooped to see if he could figure out where her heart was. In the end he decided it was hidden behind her left breast. He couldn't bring himself to damage a woman's breast. It was a sacred object: the thought of injuring it made him feel ill. So he shot her in the head. Another big book slammed. That was enough.

He was satisfied, but he was also bored. He used the poker to lift her purse out of the blood, and he searched to see whom he had killed. Dr. Rosa Maria Cabezas, so her papers said. He took them, and the money; had a look through the clothes in the bedroom, to convince himself that she really was a woman; and stretched out on the bed, just to see if it was as comfortable as it looked.

When he awoke it was past midnight. He took a bath, ate all the tinned food in the kitchen (there was very little) and went back to bed. He had even found a pair of her pajamas that fitted him quite well.

“In case you're thinking it's black market, it's not,” said the Director.

“Never entered my head, sir,” Freddy Garcia lied. They were sitting down to lunch in the Director's flat and he was looking at a dish of poached salmon, something he had not seen in two years.